Adventure Gamers - Forums

Except my PC hasn’t had a working CD/DVD drive for years.

Here ya go, Charo. This might help.

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This Collection Chamber site is incredible. His writing is enjoyable, many of the games he digs up are deeeeeep excavations, and he provides his readers with the means to play them all.

Below The Root is a prime example of how, in the good ol’ days, the power of your imagination was far more important than the power of your computer. Look at that intricate box art—I could get lost in the details for an hour! Look at the screenshots of the game that comes in the box. So simple, so little to look at, and yet it would have planted such potent seeds in my mind that I would have been carried away to another world playing this game, I have little doubt.
I searched for more screenshots of the game, and the writing in the game would have also, in a less is more way, launched my imagination deep, deep, below the roots. Great name for a game, book, or musical album, too.

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Say something about…

Riddle of Master Lu is one of those almost forgotten games, that is surprisingly high quality, technically speaking. It also has one of the most convoluted “escape room” puzzles ever made. I counted the steps you need to take, and even when you do everything perfectly, you need to do 40 things in a single room.

Say something about Martian Memorandum

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I’d prefer to see a screenshot, or ideally both box art and a screen. It really helps me sink into the vibe of a game when I’m reading the opinion or forming my own.

Anyway, on to KQVII…
I’ve only played bits of it on a friend’s PC around the time it was released. I wasn’t all that impressed. The cartoony style just didn’t leave an impression, it reminded me of those older Disney movies I’d never watched and never wanted to watch. What I remember of the gameplay was that it deviated from the typical Sierra style into “click on something and see what happens”. Not to say there weren’t puzzles, but they seemed lightweight in comparison to the earlier SCI Sierra I’d known and loved. But I could be completely wrong about that because of my brief playtime. Would I play the game again and give it another shot? Sure, in a context like a community playthrough I’d be happy to do so. On my own however, it’s unlikely.

Maupiti Island: I have never even heard of this game, but it looks like it has some unique mechanics! The fact that you can see who is where, and what time it is, along with an overworld map, and a list of suspects reminds me of the modern Sherlock Holmes board game series or Laura Bow. I’m curious what the rest of the game is like.

Vampyre Story: I started playing this late last September and for the first couple of hours I thought ‘wow! This is great! Good sense of humor, decent puzzles, unique setting and characters.’ But then it kind of falls apart as you go along. The translation is an obstacle that makes solving certain puzzles much more tedious than they should be. The story, perhaps also due to the translation, loses its clarity as you go, too. I think this game is one good translation and a month of play testing away from being really great. As it stands, I didn’t even bother finishing it. Shame, because I *really* wanted to like it, based on first impressions.

Okee dokee, I’m going to cheat a little here and present a puzzle platformer. I think I should be allowed to get away with it, because so much of this thread was spent talking about Another World, Flashback, Heart of the Alien, etc.
This is another game, very similar to those mentioned above, which Eric Chahi also had a hand in. One of the most tumultuous development cycles to date, at the time it was released. The final product did not live up to a lot of critical expectations, but I played it on Playstation many many years ago and was blown away. That game is…

St_Eddie - 13 August 2022 07:49 AM

...it would simply infuriate me too much to play any game where I would inevitably spend 50% of my time internally correcting the grammar for each and every character’s line of dialogue.

I become very frustrated when games are plagued by poor grammar, typos and spelling errors, botched idioms, etcetera.
I think that anyone who is going through all the effort to design, program, and publish a game—in English—ought to go the extra inch and have it tested by native English speakers for linguistic accuracy. Compared to every other aspect of creating a game, this seems like a pretty easy one.

Takes me out of it when I find myself having to either parse poorly constructed sentences for their true meaning in order to understand what to do or what’s going on.

Baron_Blubba - 13 August 2022 11:12 AM

Maupiti Island: I have never even heard of this game, but it looks like it has some unique mechanics! The fact that you can see who is where, and what time it is, along with an overworld map, and a list of suspects reminds me of the modern Sherlock Holmes board game series or Laura Bow. I’m curious what the rest of the game is like.

It has the reputation of being one of the hardest adventures ever. I once gave it a half-hearted attempt and didn’t finish it.

Vampyre Story: I started playing this late last September and for the first couple of hours I thought ‘wow! This is great! Good sense of humor, decent puzzles, unique setting and characters.’ But then it kind of falls apart as you go along. The translation is an obstacle that makes solving certain puzzles much more tedious than they should be. The story, perhaps also due to the translation, loses its clarity as you go, too. I think this game is one good translation and a month of play testing away from being really great. As it stands, I didn’t even bother finishing it. Shame, because I *really* wanted to like it, based on first impressions.

Translation…? What do you mean, in what language did you play it? AFAIK the developers are native English speakers.

There was a remake attempt for Maupiti Island a couple of years back, by the original creator. It was on Kickstarter but failed to reach its target.

Karlok, regarding Vampyre Story: If that’s the case (and in hindsight, I remember reading that some ex-Lucas Arts employees worked on the game), then gosh darn that is some very poor writing, in almost every sense of the word ‘writing’. Often unclear and unhelpful, both from a gameplay perspective and a storytelling one.